Diana Lowenstein Gallery

LET YOURSELF BE TAKEN BEYOND THE BORDERS OF THIS WORLD

The life of each man is a path towards himself, the attempt at a path, the outline of a path. No man has become completely himself; However, each one aspires to get there, some blindly, others with more light, each one as best they can. […]

Herman Hesse

Obstinacy is, for Herman Hesse, the supreme virtue of human beings. The stubborn person is true to himself, he goes through life challenging conventions, wondering about the ultimate reason for things, only in this way does he manage to transcend reality. It is in the nature of artists to be stubborn, from that stubbornness comes the energy and courage to face one’s own fears in that constant search for an authenticity that often contrasts with social expectations and established norms.

The artist’s journey to realize his destiny begins with the abandonment of the comfort zone and it is there where Ibrahim Miranda finds not only the meaning of life, but also happiness and complete joy. Like Herman Hesse’s Demian, Miranda has spent the last thirty or forty years of her life trying to learn to overcome internal contradictions and accept herself along with her dark side. In that encounter between lights and shadows lies the unmatched strength of the imagery that, through his works, has led him to create a vision that lives outside of this world. Whether under the guise of a wandering traveler facing mythical monsters or as a wanderer desperately searching for answers among maps, Ibrahim surprises in each of his versions, renewed but without losing that essence that beyond trends identifies him in each of his creations.

Coming from a family of farmers, his first approach to art was the limitless landscapes of the Pinar del Río countryside, however, his imagination always traveled further. Influenced by poetry, literature and music, the paths of her mind expanded hand in hand with a firm, clear-line drawing from which dreamlike beings began to emerge, which like Goya’s horrors opened a dark chapter, folding of monsters and nightmares. These dark years opened the doors to more global research. The world opened up and with it came a new cartography that unleashed other chimeras. Back in childhood, his eyes began to discover shapes on maps: a rabbit in Basel, an elephant in Berlin, a pig in Sao Paulo. Maps would become a constant obsession, a way to explore the world and their place in it. This series has since become a kind of vital diary where memories, influences, dreams and obsessions are mixed that give an account of both a personal and collective memory that has its central element in the animal form of the Island.

Screen printing, with its infinite reproduction possibilities, has been key in the formation of this universe of figures and ideas that weave countless stories. Thus, Out of this world, the series that gives title to Ibrahim Miranda’s most recent exhibition display, groups on the empty background of the empty canvas the silhouettes of the metamorphosed Island, Marcel’s drawings, botanical studies, classical teachings, the huts of childhood… Freed from the cartographic background, they lend themselves to independent readings, and are configured as those small units of meaning that, by summation and recombination, have been building the artist’s fluid and constantly revised and questioned identity.

This need to organize what is dispersed in files that catalog the artist’s most expensive and sensitive obsessions has its counterpart in another group of works where graphic technique joins painting to create rhythmic visual scores that bring back that incredible multicultural mix that identifies to the artist. The sea, that indomitable mass of water that isolates us, is also a key element through which we connect with the rest of the world, but it is full of torments and memories. It is distance and closeness, “the friends who left, those who arrived or those who continue floating in the foam.” At times Ibrahim feels like a wave lost in the sea, in those days he identifies with a rōnin, a legendary Japanese samurai who, having lost the favor of his master, was forced to live as an eternal vagabond, or in other words, to accept constant adversity. Then the silhouette of the Island appears like a compass that has lost its north, wandering in a stormy ocean. It is then that those ghost stories emerge more strongly, which, also identified by the author as something out of this world, he has decided to title Kwaidan World: captivating narratives about strange and mysterious apparitions that intermingle in a world of nightmares and dreams.

On the banks of the river, when the encounter with the sea is closer, happier visions come. The kawabatas bring us familiar images that cleanse the spirit, like the ayapas in Afro-Cuban ceremonies. These magical animals balance the forces always in tension between good and evil and restore peace to the artist in the midst of that eternal search for his own terrain. That is why he returns to the Malecón, throws his nostalgia into the waters and lets himself be bathed by the salt of that sea that in each drop reveals a story out of this world.

—Lisset Alonso Compte, September 2024